3/7/13

Thoughts and ideas

After years of painting plein air I have got to a stage that I'm becoming stationary in my approach and am wanting to progress to a higher level. What this is I do not know. I'll continue to base all my work on plein air but am looking for something extra..

My main love is colour in the landscape and have been for the past 6 months trying to figure out in my head how that can be captured and expanding upon on the canvas for others to experience and love. After painting yellow rape seed fields, blue bluebells hills, purple lavender farms, red poppies I've finally had the courage to start to develop a process how I think is best to capture what is learnt from the plein air to the studio. Going out and painting a large sketch, returning to the studio to then work on the canvas simplifying what I have seen and pushing the colours that appeal to me.

Things I've been noticing and wanting to explore while painting in this way:
• What colour goes next to every other colour.
• Soft or hard edges of the shapes.
• Large shapes in the foreground with small in the background.
• Breaking shapes using diagonal lines.
• Warm and cool coloured shapes.
• Depth using colour.
• Thick foreground shapes and thin background shapes.

Throughout these blog posts you will see hopefully a development and my learnings.